


Footprints

by DeadGirlLikesButterflies



Category: Bleach
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Romance, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-15
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-25 15:11:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/640187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadGirlLikesButterflies/pseuds/DeadGirlLikesButterflies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After her death, Hisana is plunged into a violent world. The only way to survive the streets of Rukongai is to disappear, have no ties to anyone or anything and leave no trace of your existence. But when she learns of an asassination plot against one of the noble families, she chooses to risk everything to save a life. It's a choice that will force her to face a truth: her actions touch lives beyond her own and she cannot run from her past forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When the Sky Burns

**Author's Note:**

> Why World War II? It doesn't work at all with the timeline.  
> I know.  
> Still, time runs differently in Soul Society, right? Moreover, when I started this story, I set out to write something that might feel familiar to the fans, that might FEEL in-canon even if it's not. For some reason, there are loads of fan theories out there about the girls dying in World War II. So that's why.  
> Hisana mainly seemed to write herself. I planned out very little of her plot. So all the good bits are down to her, and the bad bits can be blamed on my poor writing.

The baby was crying again.  
Hisana pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her head, curling inwards, trying to block it out. It didn't stop. For a month now, on and on, it had wailed for the injustice of the world and for the parents it would never see again.  
It was, Hisana thought, intent on driving her out of her fucking mind.  
She was not a cruel person. At least, she had never considered herself so, but, right now, she was considering dashing its brains out just to make it quiet. They were both dead now, so, all in all, she thought, it might not even matter. She was a little hazy on morality in the afterlife. Unfortunately, she suspected, it might not be that simple. There were probably still rules to follow and laws to obey and, anyway, she was a good person. A kind person. Or so she had been while she'd lived.  
It had been dusk, the air sweetly humid, the colour just starting to fade from the paddies where Hisana had been working, her yukata tucked up to her thighs, the baby in a sling across her back. The little girl loved the open air. Taking her to the fields meant that Hisana was giving her parents a break, which they both sorely deserved. Her little sister had been an unexpected arrival. Not unwanted. Not exactly. But there were twelve years difference between the two girls and Hisana's mother and father were too old to be bringing up a second daughter. Hence, today, the little girl had joined Hisana in the fields and she had been good as gold: silent, all throughout the heat of the day; engrossed in the clouds that had skimmed across the summer sky and the butterflies that flew up from the rice. Then, just when they had been about to leave, the sirens had sounded.  
The war had always been a far away thing. Hisana and her family lived on the edge of the city, a city that was fat with politicians and power, so her father claimed, but they had no interest and took no part in a life that extended beyond the borders of Japan. What Hisana herself understood of the conflict had been gleaned from black and white pictures, but even they seemed distant and unreal. Glimpses into another world. All she knew for sure was that, when the sirens sounded, they had to get inside.  
She started to to run as, all around her, the other labourers did the same, some falling into the water as their feet tangled in the crop. Many sprinted towards the road, but Hisana made for a path on the far side of the paddies. From there, she only needed to cross one field and they would be home.  
A plane swept in low overhead, howling like a demon. She had heard the sirens before, but had never seen the planes, and she nearly stumbled as someone behind her screamed. To her left, she caught a glimpse of something falling from the aircraft. And then the sky exploded.  
She had reached the edge of the paddy. The force of the detonation, even at such a distance, threw her forwards, into the bank of grass. The air was suddenly full of smoke. She choked, and, in the midst of it all, the baby started crying. Crying and coughing. The little sister she was meant to be protecting.  
She knew she had to get up. Her body felt weak from the impact, but she wasn't in pain. Just shaken. And her head was ringing. And she had to get up, get back.  
She crawled up the bank. The grasses were sharp. It was hard for her to catch her breath in the smoke, which had turned the air pitch dark. Surely there had been a path here, to the right. But, she realised, it would lead her back around the field, closer to the point where the bomb had exploded. If she turned left, she would have further to run: the full length of the paddy to reach the road, and then a longer journey home still. She stood up, starting to walk along the bank with no firm decision in mind, the baby screaming and screaming.  
Another plane tore up the sky overhead. Hisana broke into a run again. Another came and another, their engines keening. Bombs began to fall on the city to the east. They lit the sky like sheet lightning, streamers of fire lacing through the clouds. Their targets were the government buildings. Yet, over to her left, one aircraft swept low over the paddy, fire blossoming in one wing. It dropped a line of explosives into the black water, sowing its own crop amongst theirs. As it howled over her head, it seemed close enough to touch.  
She had stopped running though. She had turned towards the rice field. The time between two heartbeats seemed to last  forever.  
The earth erupted. It filled the sky. A sheet of fire chased across the shallow water.  
The girl felt her body lifted.  
******************************************************************************************  
In everything, there was motion: shards of the landscape spinning like pieces of a broken mirror. Some tore through her. Other caught, like barbs, in her skin, and raked her apart. When she fell, there was nothing of her left. Only pain. And awareness.  
Awareness of falling, and of the world falling with her. Then she was lying face down, half-buried in the mud under the damp heat of her own blood.  
The baby was crying.  
She knew that was impossible. She sat up and tugged the sling from her back, then pulled the warm, screaming bundle to her chest. It squirmed and kicked. It balled up its tiny pink fists and pounded at her hands, but its every movement was like a salve to her. She sat there a long time, in the mud and the smoke, just rocking the baby. Nothing she could do would make it quiet, but, for now, she didn't mind.  
The smoke around her paled, a grey dusk seeping into the landscape. It was late and her parents would worry.  
She got to her feet and began to walk through the ruined fields. She had lost her sandals and was barefoot now. Far away, she could still hear the bombs striking the city.  
Once she reached a path she knew, she broke into a trot. She had been lucky: the injuries she'd sustained were just superficial, it seemed, and, by the way the baby she carried was bawling, she guessed that it too had escaped relatively unscathed. She felt a surge of delight and relief. They were alive, and it had never felt better.  
The landscape around her looked bleached, the colours altered from the ripe hues of the morning. Perhaps it was the smoke playing tricks on her eyes. Her head was still ringing and she wanted to be home, to be curled up in her own bed, to have returned the screaming child to its mother's arms, to be told that they were pleased she was safe and alive and well.  
Ahead of her, on the path, a man was standing.  
Waiting.  
She hesitated. There was something wrong: the washed out landscape; the faded grey sky. Only the figure on the path seemed real to her and yet he was the strangest thing of all, dressed in a black kimono and hakama, with a white cloak across his back; he looked four hundred years out of place: a samurai from a storybook.  
He was leaning back, watching the plumes of smoke on the horizon, and the trails the planes had left in their wake. As Hisana approached though, he turned towards her and smiled:  
"There you are. I didn't expect you to leave so soon."  
"Who are you?"  
"My name's Shunsui. What's yours?"  
"Hisana," she said with a scowl, and took a step backwards, holding the baby tight against her chest.  
"Don't be scared," he said.  
"Are you a ghost?"  
"Something like that."  
She took another step back:  
"Don't come near me!"  
"Where are you going, Hisana?"  
"Home! I'm going home!" But, as she spoke, his features grew sad. He shook his head:  
"You can't go home. Look down." She did. She saw the baby, still crying in her arms: "No. Not the child. Look at yourself. At the point above your heart." She lifted the baby and looked. There, stretching from the very centre of her chest, was a chain. It was black with dirt and blood and only hung down as far as her waist; from that point on, the links were broken.  
"What is that?"  
"While you lived, it connected your soul to your body."  
"I don't understand."  
"It's broken, Hisana."  
"But I'm not dead!"  
"How do you know that?"  
"Because I'm here! I'm right here!"  
"But your body was blown to pieces in the rice field just a minute's walk from here," he said matter-of-factly, pointing back the way she'd come. And, when she didn't answer, he approached, took her shoulder and gently turned her around. A wall of smoke was blackening the horizon: "I don't know why they did it, but they killed perhaps twenty people back there."  
"But I'm breathing. Now," she murmured.  
"Yes." His fingers tightened on her shoulder: "And you feel my touch, don't you? It's because your spiritual body is really no different from your human one, except that you are breathing reishi now. Spirit. Not air. And, from this moment on, you will feel neither hunger nor thirst." She couldn't answer him. The truth was in her heart, and he was more real to her than the sky, the grass, and the smoke trails overhead. "How old are you, Hisana?" he asked.  
"I'll be thirteen next month."  
"Why did they do this? Do you know?"  
She looked up at him. He seemed sad. A little coldly, she said:  
"Do you just wait here for people to die then? And then you tell them this?"  
"Huh? No!" His expression of surprise was replaced by a grin as he looked down at her: "You think I should have something better to do with my afterlife?"  
"I don't know! I don't know who you are!"  
"Shunsui Kyoraku. I'm a soul-reaper." She stiffened and his grip on her tightened. She realised he had no intention of letting her go. "That doesn't mean I take lives," he explained: "My work is in guiding spirits to the next world."  
"Then why are you wearing a sword."  
"I'll show you." Slowly, and so as not to alarm her, he unsheathed the blade and turned it about so that the hilt faced her. With his left hand, he pulled back the blankets that swaddled the child in Hisana's arms: "This is your little sister? She's a very pretty child." For the first time since the bombs had started falling, the little girl was silent. Her round blue eyes stared up at the soul-reaper. Very gently, Kyoraku touched the hilt of his sword to the baby's forehead. A mark appeared there. 'Death, life,' it read, like a tattoo on the child's brow, and it glowed with pale blue light. Hisana felt the weight in her arms dissolving. On some instinctive level, she understood, but, as the baby's form dispersed, turning into light itself, she cried out:  
"What did you do to her?"  
"You know, don't you?" Shunsui knelt down so that his face was level with hers. It was a kind face. Too kind. She wanted to scream and claw at him, tell him that this was unfair. Completely absurd! She started to tremble. There were tears on her cheeks. "Do you want to go after her?" he asked.  
"My parents will be angry."  
"Well, that's just how parents are." As he spoke, he touched the hilt of his sword to her forehead. A jagged sensation ran through her. Lights bursting inside her body. Blue-white lights that surrounded her and separated her. "Don't be afraid," she heard Shunsui say: "You're one of the lucky ones. People rarely die together, in the same instant, but you two, because you did, will be allowed to stay together in the next life. You and her; you won't ever have to be alone."


	2. Left Behind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hisana makes the decision that will change her life forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slight alteration from canon; I've made Hisana a resident of Seventy-Ninth instead of Seventy-Eighth. This simply helps the plot, so my apologies for the change.

“You will feel neither hunger nor thirst.”  
That was what he had promised her. Except, she did. Certainly, it was less than she’d felt while she was alive. She only had to eat once every few weeks now and, even then, her appetite was small. But she still got hungry. And as for the baby; it never stopped crying.   
It was hungry. It was thirsty. If she asked questions, people told her she was imagining things, that it was impossible, that what she felt and what the baby complained of were mere echoes of their lives: memories and not real appetites at all. But Hisana knew her own sister. In fact, she was beginning to hate her own sister.  
The Seventy-Ninth district of Rukongai was a dirty, hopeless place. People fought over the space for stalls to trade their wares; they fought over narrow, overcrowded rooms to live in. Since it was locked between the Seventy-Eighth and Eightieth districts, there wasn’t even space enough for slums. It was cramped. People were angry all the time, crawling over each other. Hisana had quickly lowered her expectations; she no longer sought out accommodation that appealed to her, but rather looked for rooms in buildings that were ready to collapse; places where the damp crept down the walls and the wind and rain scuttled in, or the floors were muddy and the linen used. They were the places no-one else wanted.   
She had been moving from room to room, house to house, for some time now. Where she was welcomed at first, people quickly grew tired of her once they realised the child would not stop screaming. So she had taken to sleeping in doorways in recent weeks. If the owners of the houses caught her, they beat her. She had been kicked awake four times in the last week, and now she was in yet another doorway. The men inside were drunk on sake and their hollering frightened her, but at least they were intoxicated enough not to hear the little girl’s cries:  
“Please shut up,” Hisana said. Her voice was dull. She’d set the baby down on the doorstep beside her; it balled its fists and choked on its own despair. “I didn’t ask to be here, you know, any more than you did, and if you’d just lived a minute more, just a minute, they’d have sent you somewhere else, away from me, and we’d never have had to see each other again. What would you have done then? What would you have done without me?” The girl kept on squawling, her face squashed and ugly. “Someone would have found you,” Hisana said, resting her chin on her knees: “There’s people here like there are back home. People love children. I’m not your mum. I’m not old enough. It’s not fair. Someone else would have found you and you’d have been fine.”  
She’d thought it many times, but had never said it aloud. Now, the words hung in the air, gathering a strange charm.  
Everyone who came to Rukongai came alone. If families existed at all, they were usually little more than clusters of like-minded souls. Women who had been mothers when they lived, in death consoled themselves by adopting the children who came orphaned into the afterlife. Dead or alive, people craved company and a sense of belonging.  
Hisana stared down at her sister. Try as she might, she couldn’t love that tiny, screeching bundle. She had brought her this far, but only out of duty, and what was duty in this world? She’d had a home once, a family and a future. The meaninglessness of this world never ceased to surprise her. So where were her loyalties meant to lie now? To the death gods who had brought her here? To the baby at her side? Or to herself?  
Someone would love the child.  
Before she could change her mind, she scooped it up and began to walk down the road.  
Upon entry into Soul Society, each spirit was assigned a district. There were eighty in Rukongai and Hisana and her sister had been registered with Seventy-Ninth. Souls were expected to remain in their districts unless they found employment without or married into a different region. Soul-reapers manned the checkpoints around the city and it was while passing one of these that the child suddenly fell silent.  
Hisana didn’t know the area. She had been walking blindly, trying to get up the courage to do what she knew she must, but, when the crying stopped, she stopped too. She looked down. In her arms, the baby stared up at her with an expression of such serious contemplation on its face that Hisana frowned and glanced about for an explanation. Nothing was different save for the presence of two soul-reapers at the checkpoint, speaking together in low voices.  
Hisana didn’t know what that meant and she didn’t care. All at once, it seemed a door had opened onto a way that she could be rid of the child.  
Turning her back on the guards, she pulled the blanket across the baby’s face. It remained quiet and motionless in her arms as she rearranged the bundle. The blanket, which was hand-embroidered with the baby’s name and woven from fine cotton, was perhaps the most expensive item she possessed.  
She broke into a cold sweat as she approached the checkpoint. What she was about to do was probably illegal and she wasn’t yet certain of how punishments were meted out in this world, but she did know that she was afraid of the shinigami.Like all the other souls she had met since coming here, she blamed them for her death in the human world and for all her subsequent misery. They, in turn, seemed to care little for the souls they had dropped into this world, though it was said that they kept meticulous records of the fate and whereabouts of each one.  
Standing at the checkpoint in the twilight of a late summer evening, Hisana hoped they didn’t notice she was trembling. She knew that you could die in this world. She’d seen a man killed in the street for the change in his purse. The body had lain there for a while, but, after three days, she’d heard tell that it had disintegrated into pale light. That seemed to be the way things were here, and you were meant to report all such things to the shinigami. “I need to register a death,” she said. The two uniformed men glanced at each other. She wondered if they would challenge her, but, after a moment, one of them went into the checkpoint lodge and returned with papers. Hisana gave them her sister’s name.  
“How old was she?”  
“Seven months.”  
“And how did she die?”  
“She got sick,” she said, hoping it was still possible to die that way.  
“Is the body still intact?”  
“No.”  
“Well, that’s it,” said the shinigami, folding up the papers: “We’ll check her name against the records and corroborate her death in the next census. Anything else?”  
“I need to visit Seventy-Eighth. Please.”  
“Purpose of visit?”  
“I want to sell these blankets,” she said, then she added: “I’ll get a better price for them in Seventy-eighth.” That, at least, was true. Seventy-eighth was a slightly better neighbourhood than her own.  
“Granted,” said the shinigami, and Hisana stepped through the checkpoint.  
She felt a strange sense of liberation as she walked down the wide street, which quickly became busy with the evening’s bustle. When she was certain she was lost in the crowd, she stopped, crouched down, and unwrapped the bundle she carried. The little girl’s blue eyes stared up at her curiously.  
“Maybe you understand. Just a little,” she said: “You’re going to be happy here.”  
She fashioned the blankets into a sling and lifted the baby onto her back.  
Seventy-eighth was a large district, stretching from the edge of town down to the river. There were wide roads and a bustling market, labyrinthine alleys and, at its limit, a vast slum where people fashioned their own homes out of anything they could find. Hisana followed the road down to the river. It was dusk now and people were gathering around fires on the banks. The year was winding down to autumn and the nights were getting cooler.  
She walked deeper and deeper into the district, until the moon was high. The baby had begun to cry again. Out of habit, Hisana spoke softly to the child, telling the little girl that there was no need to cry, that it would be alright, that they would be fine. Tonight though, those same words felt strange on her lips. She felt calm; not sad exactly. But she had been angry for so long: with the soul-reapers; with the citizens of Rukongai; with the world itself, and with the baby. Tonight, she didn’t feel angry any more.  
She forced herself to stop. This street wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t deserted either, and that was probably for the best. She set the child down in a doorway. It raised its hands as if it would touch her face, but she straightened and stepped back.  
At once, the intensity of those cries increased. Hisana stared around. There was no-one near, but she was gripped by a sudden fear of discovery and, without another glance, she turned and ran.  
The cries followed her down the street. How, she wondered, could so fierce a sound come from such a tiny thing? By the time she reached the riverside again, her eyes were full of tears.  
The baby would find a family. It was too young to be burdened with memories of its own death and she had done the right thing by leaving it in a district that was better than her own. Her decision to report the girl’s death meant that no-one would come looking to take her back to Seventy-ninth. Hisana would not see her again, but the child was free now, free to make this world her own in a way that Hisana would never be. Free to be who she wished to be. Not just one more victim of a senseless war.  
The only part of her that she would take into the future was her name, ‘Rukia,’ embroidered onto the blanket in which she’d died.


	3. Trial by Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hisana has survived in Rukongai by making herself invisible, unimportant. A chance encounter with the son of a nobleman, however, draws far more attention to her than she would have liked. As she becomes a tool for criminals who plan to wipe out the Kuchiki clan, she will need to use all her wits to keep from paying for a moment's curiosity with her life.

Keep your head down and walk on.  
There were ways to survive in this world and one of the most effective was to become invisible.  
Hisana had taken up residence in a house on the New Road that cut through the Seventy-Ninth district of Rukongai. It was always busy here. Always noisy. Always crowded. But it was better to be lost in a crowd than to be alone in the alleys at night. There was so much anger in the people here, so much regret and resentment, that it was only natural they took it out on one another.  
Another murder. A small crowd had gathered just yards from Hisana’s lodging. They were not particularly perturbed by the sight of a dead man nor of his blood drying in the road. It had probably been a robbery, or someone’s idea of entertainment. Hisana stepped around them with care and continued on.  
She had to step down into the gutter as a coach and horses passed. But she was at her door now. It was probably safe to risk a glance back.  
The carriage was very fine indeed, fashioned from polished black wood inlaid with diamond-shaped panels. It had been forced to a halt by the gathered crowd, whose presence had narrowed the street considerably, and the two horses were pawing the ground and jigging sideways away from the commotion. The driver rose in his seat and shouted at the bystanders to move out of the way, but they threw only cursory glances in his direction.   
The New Road was used by people from many different districts, including the shinigami from the sereitei and wealthy citizens from districts One to Ten, but that didn’t change the fact that this was Seventy-ninth and people here had little time for passers-by from any walk of life. The driver continued to shout. His employers were holed up safely in their vehicle, the windows shuttered as if they could blinker themselves to the depravity they were forced to pass through.  
As Hisana watched though, one of the shutters shifted just an inch. She saw a single blue-grey eye pressed up against the gap, flicking this way and that. A child, she guessed. The curiosity of that pale gaze was too intense to belong to an adult. Like a spotlight, it fell on her, and Hisana found herself staring back, the unwilling subject of somebody’s attention.  
“What are you looking at, my little bird?” said a voice close to her ear. She started. She had been so intent on the carriage to notice the man who had approached her from behind. And now a hand closed over the back of her neck: “Have you never seen a dead body before?”  
“No. Excuse me.” She tried to slip away, but the hand tightened.  
“Take a good look. You don’t have to stand here, you know. Why don’t you go and stand with the others? Or didn’t you want to be associated with them? Maybe you think you know something.”  
“No. I didn’t see anything.”  
“Are you sure? I don’t mind.” He slipped one hand around her waist and pulled her close to him. She went very still. “Aren’t you going to fight me?”  
No. She wouldn’t struggle and she wouldn’t run. The violence here was senseless. In a place where there were no final rewards or answers for the dead, people did what they did just so that they could feel alive again. She understood that. “Aren’t you going to talk to me?” The hand on the back of her neck transferred to her chin and he tilted her head back, trying to make her look up at him. She closed her eyes. Just to feel alive. What he wanted was a response. A reaction. He wanted her fear. “Little bird?”  
There was shouting; the sound of footfalls.  
She was released suddenly, so suddenly that she had to catch herself against the wall of her home. The man who had been holding her laughed unpleasantly, but he didn’t come after her and, against her better judgement, she turned around to see what had happened.  
A boy was standing in the middle of the street, but a boy who looked so out of place that he might have been a bright apparition painted onto a colourless world. In all the filth and dust of Rukongai, he alone was clean and pale. His skin was smooth; his face soft. Yet his eyes: his eyes were old.  
Aging was different here. She’d counted off the years since she’d arrived. By rights, she should have grown old. She’d have expected her hair to turn grey and her body to grow tired. Sometimes she felt all those decades crashing in on her, but her face was still that of a girl in her late teens and, in this boy, she recognised something similar. He was older than he looked, she guessed; possibly by decades. And he was holding a sword, the tip of which now rested against the throat of the man who had held her. The latter though was laughing, his gullet bobbing against the blade, rows of crooked yellow teeth bared in defiance.  
“Do you know this man?” said the boy. It took Hisana several seconds to realise that he was addressing her. Even then, she knew better than to give anything away. She dropped her gaze to the ground.  
“We have a live one here!” giggled the older man: “What, did you think you’d rescue a poor, helpless maiden? What business do you have with us? Better if you’d stayed locked up in your pretty carriage. I’ll give you one chance. Your master is calling you.”  
There was shouting coming from the vehicle: the voices of a man and a woman. It had started forward again, but it was apparent that the boy had flung open the door and disembarked. Now, it was trying to execute a turn in the road. The door was opening and closing as its occupants debated whether to retrieve the boy themselves or wait for the driver to navigate back. One word was clear from their shouting though, and Hisana guessed that it was the boy’s name:  
“Byakuya!”  
“Run along, Byakuya,” said the man at the end of his sword.  
“There are laws here, just as there are laws in the Court of Pure Souls,” said the boy bravely.  
“And whenever you find me someone to uphold them, then maybe I’ll obey them.”  
“You have no business with that woman.”  
“And what would you know, of that kind of business?” He sniggered, then moved so quickly that Hisana missed the long knife he pulled from his belt. It clashed with the boy’s blade an instant later, but not before the youngster let out a cry of pain. One of his hands fell away from his sword. “You don’t get to be as old as I am without learning a thing or two,” snarled the man, forcing his weight forward. All the pride had drained from the boy’s face, replaced by fear as he realised that he was outmatched.  
A strange thing happened then: the dust at the older man’s feet began to shift, then rise as if borne on currents of air. Hisana felt a change in the air around her and, as if the two were connected, a marked difference in strength suddenly became clear between man and boy. Byakuya was forced backwards, his feet skidding on the road as he tried to find a point of balance. “You think families like yours are the only ones who know how to do this? Think again. I know what I am, Boy.”  
The street had emptied. In the sudden silence, a man’s voice spoke words of command. Hisana didn’t understand them, but she felt the thunderclap that followed and the heat of the flames that roared outwards from the carriage. Instinctively, she threw up her arms to protect her face. There was a strangled cry of pain, followed by the most terrible sound of suffering. And, when she dared to look again, the man was on the ground, clutching at his left arm. It was no longer recognisable; there was nothing left but charred bone and melting flesh, which dripped to the ground as he rose on his knees and railed at the sky. The boy was standing, untouched, his expression betraying nothing as he watched these horrors.  
A man, who had leant out of the carriage door to deliver his attack, now stepped down into the otherwise empty street. He was dressed in pale blue silk and wore kenseikan in his hair and he strode over to where Byakuya stood and grasped the boy’s arm roughly, like one unused to dealing with defiance, though he kept one eye always on his prone enemy.  
“Idiot!” he told Byakuya, then turned to the writhing man: “If you so much as consider cutting my son again, the pain you will feel will be a thousand times greater than that which you are suffering now. Do you understand me?”  
Spitting, he staggered to his feet, clutching the husk of his left arm. His breaths hissed between his teeth as he gathered what strength he had to back his words:  
“You’ve made yourself an enemy today. What’s your name, ki-sama?”  
“My name is not for the likes of you.” The nobleman drew his sword and the wounded man backed away, hissing like a snake:  
“I’ll come for you. I’ll come for you when you’re sleeping.” He turned to stagger away down the road. Yet, as he did, his eyes caught Hisana’s, committing her features to memory. She looked away, but it was already too late, and her blood turned cold in her veins as she realised what that meant.  
With his enemy retreating, the man in blue turned to his son and slapped him hard across the face:  
“You think a place at Shino and a few years training make you strong? There are souls with powerful reiatsu even here, ones that will never be granted entry to the sereitei, but that does not make them weak. I told you: it doesn’t matter what you see here; you never leave the carriage.” He glanced at Hisana: “There’s nothing noble about saving souls that are already condemned.”  
As he fell into step behind his father, Byakuya’s eyes lingered on her. When he did, at last, look away, it was as if the ropes that had been holding her were cut. She bolted into the house, slamming shut the door behind her and heaving the locks into place. That would do for now, but she would not be able to stay here. She stood, panting, in the middle of the square room that was her home. Sixty years, she’d counted off: sixty years of falling below the radar, all ruined in a single moment of carelessness. The shinigami would not let her leave Seventy-ninth. She could move to another part of the district, but there was a strong possibility he might still find her.  
She looked around. There was nothing she needed here. She would leave tonight.  
She had chosen to live on the New Road because there was safety in numbers. The merchants who passed through every day made it easy for her to become just another anonymous face in the crowd. She would stay on the New Road then, if she could, and try to find a place to live, perhaps on the far side of the district, where it ran into Eightieth.  
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But no-one lives alone. Their lives leave traces and make connections that, once forged, cannot be unforged.  
Hisana recognised the carriage. She didn’t want to, but she did, and so she noticed that it passed down the New Road on one day each month and returned a week later, as regular as clockwork. If it passed close to her, she turned away, so as not to catch the eye of anyone inside, and the few times she did look up, she was relieved to see that the window shutters were closed. Its presence, his presence, became just another part of a broader pattern, the turn and return of day and the season.  
Yet still she noticed when, one day, the carriage didn’t come.  
Two years had passed since her meeting with its occupant, two years in which she’d settled into a routine of moving from place to place, never staying too long anywhere, never making a house into a home. Mostly, she stayed indoors unless she had chores to do, such as washing her clothes in the canal or, less frequently, purchasing food and water to quell her occasional hungers. In her solitude, she sustained herself on memories. Twelve years she’d had in the real world. She’d been poor and she’d worked every day since she’d been old enough to carry grain, and yet the life she’d lived then had seen many sunrises and sunsets; she’d known friends; she’d had a family.  
Her little sister haunted her. The girl would be grown up by now, although Hisana could still pass for a woman in her early twenties. Was Rukia, she wondered, living in this same self-imposed isolation? Was she picking her way, day to day, between the thieves and the murderers, losing herself in the seas of empty faces? Or worse, had she become one of them? More often than not, in the long dark between sleeping and morning, Hisana believed her sister had probably died sixty years ago. She no longer believed that there were people here who wanted to love abandoned babies and, even if there had been, why would they have chosen one that, in a world free of hunger, seemed constantly to demand feeding?  
Those were her thoughts when she lay alone at night. But, by day, and amongst the crowds that flowed up and down the New Road like noisy tides, she couldn’t stop herself searching. She would be a woman. Of slight build. The same thick black hair as her sister. The same fierce blue eyes that had stared at Hisana out of an infant’s face, sixty years ago. She would be there.  
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After a three month absence, the carriage resumed its monthly journey, shutters invariably closed. Hisana had been relieved, at first, that it was gone. Then curious. Now that it had returned, she felt even less connected to it than before. In her mind, she was invisible again, and she preferred it that way.  
It was late summer, cool evenings and warm days, as Hisana picked her way down to the canal between heaps of rubbish that people had left to rot in the heat. In the afternoon, the sun was no longer cruel, but she still broke a sweat, labouring under a bundle of clothes. As she walked though, she became aware of someone moving parallel to her on the other side of the road. Shadowing her. The movements were too deliberate to be mere chance, and he constantly glanced in her direction. A tall man, poorly dressed like nearly everyone in Seventy-ninth, with greasy blond braids hanging to his waist. He had a fox-like face. Pale blue eyes gleamed out of a dust and dirt-stained mask.  
She was safer on the New Road than she was in the maze of alleyways, although, she thought, in the latter, there was always a chance that she could throw him off her trail. Had he followed her from the house? Her heart sunk at the thought of having to move again so soon.  
She stayed on the road and proceeded as naturally as she could towards the canal. There, she crossed a shingle beach and joined the other women washing their clothes in the warm water. The beach was a man-made one, shared, for this purpose, between the districts and Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth. As such, it was usually under the close eye of the shinigami who were quick to check that souls returned to their allocated district. Today though, she could see no-one standing guard.  
She stayed longer than was necessary, aware of his eyes on her back as she worked. There was a plan forming in her mind.  
Having made a decision, she joined a crowd of women heading back towards Seventy-eighth. It was the opposite direction to the one she’d originally intended, but, for now, it would suit her purposes. Her pursuer remained, some ten paces behind. Where the road became busy just before the checkpoint, she picked her moment, then darted out across the street, cutting behind a cart carrying sheafs of grain. At least, she hoped that was what he would see because, as soon as the cart had hidden her from view, she dropped the bundle of clothes she carried and caught the edge of the vehicle as it passed, swinging her body up onto the sackcloth covering the corn. She flattened herself. And hoped. The rich, sweet smell of the wheat reminded her of her human life and the fields around her home. She felt like a hunted animal gone to ground.  
As they crested the hill and the cart began to trundle towards the busy centre of Seventy-ninth, she slipped off again and ducked into one of the alleyways. Though she was alone now, she had no intention of following a simple route home.  
Fortunately, the alley she had chosen was relatively empty. There were a few bodies propped up against the walls. Hard to tell if they were alive or dead. Rats darted around their bony shins. One corpse reached out for her ankle as she passed by and she kicked his hand away, quickening her pace. Moving deeper into the labyrinth of streets.   
The paths she was walking now were sunken into the earth, eroded perhaps by the passage of hundreds of thousands of feet across the centuries. The buildings began to close over her, subsidence having allowed the upper floors to merge, while leaving the street below enclosed. She had never been to this part of the district before. Her sense of direction demanded that she turn left, but the walls to either side of her meant that she had no option but to keep walking.  
“Idiot,” she chastised herself under her breath. The alleys were leading her back to the canal, the path sloping down again. Now and again she caught glimpses of sunlight sparkling on a stretch of water beyond the buildings. It was early evening now. It would be dark soon.  
Finally, another alley intersected hers and she was able to turn left, back-tracking a little. Her bare feet were covered in damp red dust from the earth here. The buildings still blocked out the sky. She walked on into an area where torches burned in the walls and no bodies lay in doorways. The flicker and cackle of the flames cast moving shadows on the walls around her and it seemed to her that she was being watched.  
A figure blurred into existence before her. She had never seen someone move at such speed, so it seemed to her that he had simply stepped out of thin air. The man who had been following her.  
She turned to run, but he dropped into a bow before her. He crouched so low that he touched his knuckles to the ground and dipped his hair into the red dust. She froze, mid-turn, the only sound that of her breathing and of the torches burning.  
“Dangerous to walk these streets alone, young miss,” he said. He lifted his head, but did not stand or move towards her.  
“What do you want?”  
“I am a servant in the household of Lord Byakuya Kuchiki. My name is Shun Isamu. My master sent me to make enquiry of you.”  
“What?” She turned back to face him fully. The words sunk in, but her mind refused to make sense of them: “He sent you to me?”  
“To enquire,” he said, standing up: “As to whether you would be willing to meet with him?”  
“Meet – him?”  
“You have not met with him before then?” The servant blinked:  
“No – I – don’t know him.”  
“Oh.”  
“I mean, I know of him. That is, I saw him once, but it was years ago. I haven’t seen him since.” She broke off, panting. These were probably more words than she’d spoken to any one person in a decade. She took a deep breath: “How did you know where to find me?”  
“He gave me a description: a girl who lives on the New Road in Seventy-ninth; skinny; a little over five foot, and black hair that she never seems to brush. As if she thinks no-one would look at her. That’s what he said.”  
She stared at him then shook herself. This was reality. This was survival, not the fanciful entreaties of a young man with no experience of life in Rukongai:  
“I’m sorry. I can’t meet with your master.”  
“Why not?”  
“Because it would be dangerous for us both. It’s dangerous for me to be talking to you even now!” She turned away, wrapping her arms around her chest.   
His fingers dug into her arm. Damn, but he moved fast!  
“Don’t leave,” he said.  
“Please let go.”  
“You wait for his carriage to pass every month. You’re always outside your house, waiting. Am I really meant to believe the only time you ever met him was that once?”  
“Yes! You’re his servant! Wouldn’t he have told you that?”  
His face hardened. She stared down at his hand on her arm, and her heart sunk. When she spoke again, it was barely audible: “Please let go of me.”  
“My master wants to see you. If you want to keep that pretty face of yours, you’d best not struggle.” He pushed her ahead of him and she started to walk, feeling dizzy in the torchlight.  
It was always better not to fight them. She’d learnt that. Why? Because she wasn’t strong. It had always been easier to give people what they wanted. It had always been the lesser cost. But this was different. It wasn’t a robbery or a random beating. Tonight, they had come searching for her and no-one else. If she was, herself, the thing they wanted, then compliance wasn’t going to save her.  
It was dark now. They were only a few paces from the canal. She had slowed and the man tightened his grip on her arm, shoving her forwards, at which point she twisted and sunk her teeth into his wrist. He gave a yelp of pain. In the instant his grip slackened, she bolted.  
And that should have been enough. She was fast, had a head start, and the alleyway was clear. Her fear made her numb to the exertion. The street ascended, ever higher, away from the canal and she streaked over shadows lengthening in the dust. It should have been enough.  
Then a force she could neither see nor touch wrenched her arms behind her back. Her ankles were pulled together. Though she knew it was impossible, her hands and feet were bound, mid-step. Momentum carried her forwards, so that she struck the ground with enough force to roll several times before stopping. Lying there, she could see her pursuer. He’d not moved from where she’d left him, but he had stretched out his right hand, palm forward, and was holding his wrist with the other. There was a faint feeling of electricity in the air.  
Hisana tried to move, but her wrists and ankles were still trussed even if she could see no bindings there. She knelt up, craning her neck to find the restraints. The man was approaching, but he wasn’t bothering to hurry. “I told you not to run. What did I say? Do you remember?”  
She didn’t answer. She watched him come straight towards her and, with no deliberation or hesitation, he kicked her in the face. Then in the ribs, lifting her body off the ground.  
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When her head stopped ringing, she found herself face down in the gutter. She was choking on the blood from her nose and the man was pulling her upright. He grabbed her chin and turned her head to the left and to the right, surveying the damage: “I told you not to run if you wanted to stay pretty, stupid girl. Are you going to come with me now?”  
She blinked. One of her eyes was full of blood; the other wouldn’t focus. “I said: are you going to come with me?”  
“Yeah,” she managed, and she felt the bindings on her wrists and ankles dissolve. She collapsed forward, and he caught her in his arms:  
“Stupid girl,” he said, lifting her.  
She could see the ground beneath her as he carried her, but she wasn’t sure of up or down or left or right; only of the motion of his footfalls, jarring her body, and the smell of the canal. Then there was light: a fire. Other bodies. A circle of seated figures. She was dumped unceremoniously onto a dusty floor, her back against the wall. “There you go, though I think she knows less about him than you give her credit for,” said the one who had been carrying her.  
She tried to take in her surroundings: an abandoned boat-house; three walls and a ceiling. The fourth side of the structure opened onto the canal. She could see the lights of the sereitei reflected in the narrow strip of water, and candles burning in the houses on the opposite bank. Houses that were in another district altogether with occupants who cared little about what happened on the far side of the water. Inside the boat-house, there were eight men ranged around a metal barrel in which a fire was burning. Only the one who had been carrying her stood close enough for the light to illuminate his face. He was holding his arm out over the flames, using the light to examine a purple bruise on his wrist: “She bit me!” Several of the men laughed, but one didn’t:  
“You must have made her angry then.” He shuffled over to the fire. He needn’t have come into the light though; Hisana already knew him, had heard his voice many times in her nightmares: “Isn’t that right, Little Bird?”  
As she watched, he reached into the fire with his left hand and retrieved a burning coal and, with it gripped tightly between his fingers, he began to shuffle towards her.  
His left side, of course, was no longer formed of flesh and bone. The limb that Byakuya’s father had burned away was now metal: an ugly contraption that bore all the hallmarks of amatueur manufacture. Yet it was hinged at the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist, and the fingers moved all together. The weight of device though, on a man who had perhaps never been well-muscled, made him list to one side, giving him a rolling gait. After two years, his face was unchanged: his hair was receding from his temples, but hung down his back in long, gnarly locks. His cheeks were unshaven and his teeth were the yellow she remembered, snaggled and cocked like broken nails in his mouth: “I was looking for you,” he said: “You left so quickly; where did you go? All the way to the other side of the road? Oh yes, you remember me, don’t you?”  
She didn’t answer. She had lowered her gaze the moment he’d looked in her direction, letting her hair fall across her eyes. Now, he reached out and touched her chin with his right hand, lifting her head. The moment he saw her, he pulled away as if stung: “Shun! I told you not to mess with her face!”  
“And I said she bit me!”  
“What did you tell her?”  
“That this Lord Byakuya wished to see her.”  
“She didn’t believe you. You’re a shit actor.” He sat back on his heels, considering her: “Your handsome prince didn’t come back for you then? In the end, it turns out, you’re just one of us. Filthy. Ugly. Just like everyone else. Well, no matter. It wasn’t you I wanted, though it seemed to me you might have been a way to get back at him. Maybe I was wrong.” He frowned: “You failed to hold his affection long enough to be of use to me. Unless – hm, yes. It may be that you can still help. Tell me, do you know when his carriage will next pass down the New Road?”  
“No,” she whispered.  
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Little Bird?”  
“I’ve watched her for two months now,” said the man by the fire. “I’ve seen the carriage four times and, every time, she’s been outside waiting.”  
“That’s not true,” she said, barely daring to raise her voice.  
“Well, maybe not waiting,” he said, glancing down at her. He frowned, then addressed the crippled man: “I’m not even sure she knows she’s doing it, but she makes sure she’s there, one way or another.”  
“Ah, really?” The older man showed all his yellow teeth: “Well, somehow that’s even sweeter, isn’t it? And even sadder for you, Little Bird.”  
“Please” –   
He reached out and ran the fingers of his right hand through her hair:  
“Please what?” But she didn’t know and couldn’t answer. He stroked her cheek where the skin felt numb with bruising: “The carriage is due, isn’t it?”  
“Why are you asking me?”   
“Because I want to greet him this time. I got lucky, you see. A few months ago, I, Taro Sutaro, killed his mother and his father. Not personally, you understand. I’m hardly capable of that, thanks to you, but I have connections. I’m still able to set events in motion. So now he’s an orphan, the same as the rest of us. And I want him to remember my face. Is that a good enough reason for you?”  
“I won’t tell.”  
“I think you will.” He uncurled the fingers of his left hand. A single coal still burned against the metal: “I don’t feel it anymore, you see. All the pain is gone. Don’t you wish for that sometimes?” She shook her head as he took her left hand in his right and uncurled her fingers for her. She tried to take it back, but his grip was strong: “The fire can only burn you once,” he said, motioning to tip the coal into her hand:  
“Alright! I’ll tell you! The carriage is going west on the New Road tomorrow afternoon!”  
“Tomorrow? Too soon. I can’t organise anything for tomorrow afternoon.”  
“A week then. He’s always gone a week. When he comes back, it will be a week from tomorrow.”  
“Better.” He looked thoughtfully at the coal still lying in his left hand: “I wonder, do you know what it feels like to burn, Little Bird?”  
A wall of flames races across the rice paddy towards her, engulfing her world in the space of a heartbeat.  
His face had changed. He was staring at her and, briefly, she saw a man behind those eyes and not a monster. Whatever he had seen in her face had made him change his mind: “Well, maybe you do,” he said, closing his metal fingers over the coal. As he stood up, he dropped it back into the fire and addressed his men: “A week from tomorrow. Ryuu, you contact your people in the sereitei. Ensure there’s no shinigami presence. Gunira, I want twenty – no, make it forty men. This one’s slippery. But when it’s done we’ll have brought down one of the four noble houses in Soul Society. Us! Men from the Seventy-ninth and the Eightieth! People born from nothing!” The gathered men got to their feet, clamouring assent. Only Shun kept his face turned towards Hisana:  
“Careful, Master. Do you want me to restrain her?”  
“No. There’s no need.” Taro glanced over his shoulder: “She won’t run.”  
“But” –   
“I said no.”  
They gathered around the fire. Hisana lay still, her back against the wall, watching them talk. There was indeed a clear passage for her to the canal, but she didn’t take it. She felt tired: tired, like she’d spent the last sixty years running and getting nowhere.  
When they finished, six of the men, mere shadows to her, broke away and headed out into the night. Only Shun and his master remained. Taro returned and crouched down. Gently, he cradled her head in his metal hand and she shivered at his touch: “I told you she wouldn’t run, Shun. You see, I know her too well for that. Alright.” He let her head fall, moved down her body and traced his hard fingers down her leg, drawing a white line in the dust from the street where it had stained her skin scarlet. His hand closed like a vice over her right ankle. Involuntarily, she flinched, jerking her leg back. It only made him tighten his hold and she felt the small bones in her foot grind beneath his thumb. With his other hand, he began to wrap a thick chain around her ankle.  
Round and round: “There is something I want you to experience though. Half my body is metal. But it doesn’t make me feel strong. It doesn’t make me into something more than a man. It’s heavy. Every day, it’s like dragging a terrible, terrible weight. Can you imagine that? I don’t think you can unless I clip your wings a little.” He sighed and rose to his feet, his body clanking like a machine changing gears: “Can you lift your leg?”  
She tried, but she couldn’t even move it. He’d wrapped the chain around it several six or seven times and the weight of it was like concrete. She shook her head. “Good. I just wanted you to feel what it was like. To have something like that, pulling you down.” He turned away: “Shun.”  
”Yes, Sir.”  
The two men stepped out of the boathouse. She could see them clearly in the moonlight now. Shun’s expression was sad as he glanced back at her. The other man, Taro, had his back to her and was staring out across the water.  
“Are you going to leave me here?” she called after them, a note of panic creeping into her voice. She didn’t know why, but the thought of being alone suddenly filled her with horror.  
“No,” he said, without looking back at her. “Shun.”  
The younger man moved over to where an anchor rested on the boathouse pier. It should have been too large for one man to move, but she had already been prithee to some of his powers. His hands glowed with ethereal light. He never touched the hulk of metal, but it nonetheless pitched into the water. There was a great, gulping splash as the canal swallowed it, and then a slithering sound as the chain to which it was attached began to unravel into the water: “Sayonnara, Little Bird,” Taro called back: “So now you know how it feels.”  
She realised far, far too late what he had done.  
Her fingers were suddenly slippery with sweat as she tried to find purchase in the chain on her leg. There was none. It was tight as a bandage and, within seconds, it was yanked out of her reach. Her body followed, dragged through the dust on the boathouse floor. Though she knew it was useless, she dug her nails into the wood until they tore and bled.  
The weight of metal on her leg pulled her out into the moonlight, across the muddy path and over the pier. The last thing she saw was the figures of the two men on the shore, watching her hopeless struggle. Then the water embraced her like a cold blanket, filling her ears and her nose and her eyes.  
There was only darkness. Then shafts of moonlight as her sight adjusted. Streams of bubbles shimmered in a strange, underworld glow. There was a pain in her chest, but she couldn’t move and she couldn’t feel her body save when it was tugged suddenly in a different direction.  
She was no longer falling. Rather, she was being dragged horizonatally. She had presence of mind enough to recall the bridge and the dyke on the border of Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth, which sucked in all the detritus of the canal. She knew she didn’t want to be anywhere near to it   
She was gaining momentum though. A vast, black wall was emerging from the shadows. She could see the chain being dragged into it, could just make out the eternal motion of the cogs that crushed and separated the rubbish the people threw into the river.  
Her arms wouldn’t move. There was nothing but a burning in her chest as her body tried to tell her mind that she would have to breathe soon.  
As she drew closer, she could see that the cogs themselves were sharpened into blades. They were breaking through the links in the chain, consuming it, but, for every link broken, another was pulled into the mechanism. Her mind was racing, but her thoughts were growing pale. They were disconnecting. Her chest was on fire as she tried desperately to remember not to open her mouth, not to try to breathe.   
An impact shook her body, wrenching her back into the now. She was in the shadow of the dyke, could feel the currents drawing her in different directions and could see the mass of shadows whirring and spinning behind her. Another impact reverberated through her leg, followed by bright pain as the chain that held her broke and the spiked wheels sunk deep into her leg. An involuntary shudder convulsed her body, ripping her foot free of the mechanism, even as her mouth opened in an involuntary scream and, at once, filled with water. Her fingers scratched through currents as heavy as lead. She kicked at shadows. Her fingers brushed the surface and then, at last, she could lift her head from the water and swallow damp, cold air.  
She began to cough. She was tired and her head kept dipping back down into the black water so that she choked again and again as mouthfuls trickled down her throat. But she was breathing again now. And still alive, against all the odds.  
The lights of the shore were very far away.  
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How long could she stay afloat, she wondered? She was swimming against the current, but her motions were weak and all they achieved was to keep her from being dragged back into the dyke. So she would have to succumb, in due course, either to exhaustion or to the pain in her leg that was threatening to overrule her other senses. Her whole body was numb, save for that right leg, which was ablaze.  
The shore was some twenty feet away. It might easily have been twenty miles.  
She found that, suspended there, her mind turned instinctively to her human death. Why? She didn’t want her last memory to be of the rice fields burning. She didn’t want to hear her sister’s cries again. She didn’t want violence and regret to be her only companions at the end. Yet what choice did she have now, she wondered? The last time she’d kept any real company, it had been the child’s. The last person she’d embraced had been the little sister she’d abandoned.  
No. That wouldn’t be enough for her. With an effort that seemed to tear apart the very fibres of her being, she began to swim.  
She kicked at the water. Tore it. Sunk into it and surfaced many times. When at last her hands and knees brushed against shingle, her vision was already dark. She floundered, blind, then fell into the sand.   
Those who found her many hours later were the beggars and street-rats who scavenged from bodies washed up by the river. Since she carried nothing of value though, her story was of little interest to them.  
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Hisana woke because the sun was warm against her hand. And because someone was poking her with a stick.  
She opened her eyes and lifted her head. An auburn-haired boy, who looked old enough to know better, was crouching atop a heap of rubbish, holding a crudely fashioned fishing spear with which he was gently nudging her shoulder.  
He squealed as she moved:  
“It’s alive!” And, at once, the beach erupted with movement as a half dozen children launched themselves from their hiding places and sprinted away across the shingle. One of them, a girl in a lilac kimono, with short black hair, paused briefly, either to check that Hisana was alright or to ensure she was not about to follow them. Either way, Hisana couldn’t see her clearly, but she did notice that her eyes were a dark, cobalt blue.  
She rubbed her own. One was almost entirely swollen shut. The other was coated in dried blood. After wiping away the worst of it, she was able to see again. The children, including the girl, were gone.  
Parts of her body were catching up with her awareness at different rates. She knew she was exhausted. She was also bruised from head to toe, though her face had taken the brunt of Shun’s anger. She tasted blood every time she licked her lips. Then there were her ribs, which felt bruised but not broken. And her leg. She leant over to check her right leg and groaned; the knives had flayed the flesh almost down to the bone. The sight of it sickened her and yet, she supposed she was extraordinariily lucky to have emerged with the limb intact at all. The dyke had nearly killed her, but it had also saved her life by breaking through the chains that held her. And it was the thickness of the chains that had given her the split second she needed to pull her foot free. In fact, were it not for Taro’s decision to wind them around her ankle six or seven times, she guessed that the gears of the machine would have chewed her leg off at the calf. It looked as if it had had a good try, she thought and, turning round, she was sick on the sand. She felt a little better after that.  
Now was not the time to be delicate. She tore strips from the bottom of her kimono and began to wrap the wound inexpertly. It would need attention, but the most important thing now was simply that she be able to walk.   
She tried to stand, gingerly putting weight on the injured leg. The pain brought tears to her eyes and she nearly sunk down again, overcome by the thought of the long trek back up the hill to a home she would inevitably have to leave. But the sun was high in the sky. She had been unconscious for hours. Her body felt cold. If she didn’t leave now, she thought, she might never leave and she may as well curl up here, on the banks of the canal, and wait to die.  
She hesitated: yes, the sun was high, and that meant that it was past noon.  
And that meant his carriage would be passing west on the New Road.  
She started walking.  
Every movement was agony, but, if she squeezed her eyes closed and told herself there was no other choice, then she could focus on putting down the next step. By the time she reached the New Road, her face was molten with tears and there was no sign of the carriage. She slumped down on a low wall and waited for the worst of the pain to fade. It would do her no good, no good at all, to fall into a faint now.  
And that was when she saw it coming. The street was clear and the horse was going at a steady trot. She realised at once that it would go straight past her and down the hill and that would be it, she would have missed her chance.  
She stepped out in front of the horse.  
The driver hauled on the reins, forcing the animal to the left so that it wouldn’t trample her. He hollered abuse.  
“Please listen!” she cried: “I have a message for Byakuya Kuchiki!” But it was too late. The horse was moving on. She smacked the side of the carriage with both hands: “Byakuya! Byakuya! You have to hear this! Byakuya! Please!” The shutters remained closed. The wheels rolled on, perilously close to her feet. She dug her finger-nails into the edge of the window-frame: “Byakuya, please listen to me! Byakuya!”  
But the driver cracked his whip. The sudden burst of speed as the horse broke into a canter sent her sprawling into the dust and mud.  
She could feel the eyes of passers by upon her. Keeping her eyes down, she tried to stand, but her leg buckled and she sunk back down with a grunt of pain. Only then, two strong hands took her arms at the elbow and lifted her to her feet. She staggered, but looked up now into the face of the boy who had come to her aid two years before.  
His eyes widened as he saw the blood on her face:  
“Who did this?”  
“They want to kill you. They’re going to set a trap with forty men when you come back from the place where you go. They told me that your name was Kuchiki and that they’d bring down a noble house. He killed your mother and father. Not him, but he sent men to do it. And that’s why you didn’t come back down the New Road for those three months, wasn’t it? After they died. Now he wants you and it’s my fault” –   
“Stop. Stop.” He took hold of her shoulders and she sagged, letting him lead her out across the road and back to the low wall where she sunk down without another word. He knelt, studying the clumsy bandaging on her leg. As he did, she began to recount what she’d heard the night before, more calmly now. He stiffened, just once, when she mentioned his parents: “Well,” he said, when she had finished: “That’s quite a story.”  
He didn’t believe her.  
She looked up and instintively flattened herself against the wall. Four shinigami stood, ranged about them in a loose circle. “They’re just my men,” said Byakuya: “I find it’s easier not to travel alone anymore. They won’t hurt you,” he added, seeing her face: “Now, do you mind if I” – Carefully, he began to unwind the bandages. She flinched. “Sorry.”  
By the time he had finished unwrapping the wound, his expression of good-natured tolerance for a tall tale had fallen away. His face was pale with anger as he studied the injury, and he glanced at the shinigami as if they would corroborate what he was seeing. “Who did this?” he said again.  
“I told you.” This time, when his eyes met hers, they were serious. It had taken this to make him believe her. “Alright. I need you to stay perfectly still. Can you do that for me?” She nodded.  
A soft green glow surrounded her leg. The sensation was not painful, but it was not altogether pleasant either, and it took an effort of will on her part not to pull away. This was their healing magic, she knew. She had never seen it before. As he worked though, she found her eyes roving to his face. He was concentrating, unaware of her attention. In two years, she realised, he had barely aged at all, though his eyes seemed colder than she remembered. He had lost his parents since their last meeting. She sensed that change in him: the youthful certainty, the idealism, was gone. In its place there was a dignity she hadn’t noticed before.  
She asked him something then that she had never, in all of her years in Rukongai, dared ask anyone before:  
“Can you help me?” she said.  
The light faltered and then resumed as he glanced up at her face then down again.  
Her shoulders sagged. For all the courage it had taken her to ask, she already knew the answer: “It’s not that simple, is it? There are laws” –   
“I can’t arrange for you to leave this district. I’m sorry.”  
“Because you can’t save souls that are already condemned?”  
“My father’s words. Not mine.” He finished work on her leg and straightened: “How is it?”  
She wriggled her toes. Astonishingly, there was now no more than a dull ache in her bones, though her calf and ankle were meshed with silver scars. “Those will fade, I think,” he said: “I’ve never been skilled in healing, but you’ll be able to walk now.” He frowned as she stood up, testing her weight. “What would you have done if I’d not been here?”  
“I don’t know.”  
“I’ll give your name to the shinigami who police this district. They can keep an eye out for you” –   
“No.”  
“They can keep you safe.”  
“No!”  
“Why not?”  
“If I’m seen with the shinigami – if they’re seen to help me – I’ll be in even more danger than I am now. Would you have everyone in this district turn against me? People here hate shinigami.”  
He stared:  
“And what about you? Do you feel the same?” In answer, she turned away, and the boy let out a patient sigh: “Fine,” he said: “Fine, but what is your name, anyway?” She glared at him. “What? You really think I’d break my word? Give me your first name then. There’s no way I could find you in the registers without your family name, so there’s nothing I could do with your first name save call you by it!”  
“Hisana,” she said, dropping her voice so that only he would hear.  
“Alright.” He gave a signal and the four shinigami who had been guarding them began to move back in the direction of the carriage. As soon as their backs were turned, Byakuya addressed her in a softer voice: “Thank you. If what you’ve told me is true, then you have done me a great service today. You are amazing, Hisana-san.” And, with a deep bow he left her, standing alone outside her house.


	4. In a Night Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Byakuya visits Hisana.

On the night when the ambush on Byakuya and his retinue was planned, Hisana did not go out in the street, but she did climb onto her roof and, from there, watched bursts of light and flashes of magic as fighting broke out on the New Road. It happened on the edge of Seventy-ninth and Eightieth. It was all over in minutes. And a cold wind rolled in off the mountains, snatching at Hisana’s hair.  
“I know you’re there,” she said after a moment.  
“How? How do you know?”  
“I can feel you.”  
“You sense reiatsu.”  
“I don’t know. I can feel you though.” She turned. He was standing on the narrowest part of the roof, perfectly balanced, the long black robes of a shinigami poised in the wind. On his hip, he carried a sword.  
Disappointed, Hisana turned away.  
“I came to tell you that they’re dead. They can’t hurt you anymore,” he said.  
“I understand.”  
“Most of them had low spiritual pressure. One was powerful; his body burnt up shortly after he died.”  
“Hm.” She shivered: “And now that they’re gone, where do you think they are, Kuchiki-sama?”  
“Please call me Byakuya.”  
“Byakuya-sama,” she amended: “Because is it possible that there’s another world beyond this one? With other shinigami to take away their souls? Does it just go on forever?”  
“I don’t know,” he said, but she could hear that it was only half the truth, and she waited. “I don’t think so,” he admitted at length.  
“Then what do you think?” She turned towards him: “Does it end here? Like this? Without any answers?”  
“What questions did you have?”  
“I just want to know whether you believe that this is the last world? The end of it all?”  
He frowned:  
“Those who live out their lives here will return to the cycle of rebirth in the human world.”  
“If they live for their full term.”  
“Yes.”  
“But what about the ones who die early, who are murdered, who become sick? What about them? What about the men you killed today?”  
“They are no longer a part of the cycle.”  
These were facts, she realised: not guesswork or even faith. He knew.  
“That’s what your father meant,” she whispered, turning back again to the lights of Rukongai and, beyond it, the sereitei. Suddenly, they seemed streaked, smudged like a painting, and she realised she was crying: “I always wondered why he said that we were already condemned and now I know. Because people die out here every day. They die early. We’re the ones who won’t be reborn, Byakuya-sama. We’re the ones you don’t need to save.”  
“I don’t believe that.”  
“You don’t need to.” She brushed away tears with the ball of her hand. The sereitei looked so beautiful from here, its crystalline towers ablaze with lights and yet she could not forgive the shinigami for bringing her here. She had been alone now for nearly a century, but never lonely until now.  
Byakuya did not answer. She suspected that he had no answers. Facts, yes, but not answers. The air whispered as he left the rooftop. She didn’t need to turn to know he was gone, but she did, to stare at the empty patch of sky where he had been standing.


End file.
